Should trans screen roles be played by trans actors?

Actress Victoria Atkin on the set of Hollyoaks with Benson Bell, a 15-year-old transgender boy who has acted as a consultant on the storyline. Photograph: Colin McPherson
Colin Mcpherson/Colin McPherson

"He's playing a transsexual," said Ben Stephenson, controller of drama commissioning, as the BBC announced that Sean Bean would star as Simon, an English teacher with an "alter ego" named Tracie in legal drama Accused. "[It's] a brilliant story," Stephenson told the Broadcasting Press Guild, "untold, I think, on mainstream television." Bean's appearance is the latest to raise an issue constantly debated within certain circles: should trans roles on screen be played by trans people?

Critiquing stereotypical portrayals in Whipping Girl, Julia Serano stated that "in a world where transsexual and intersex works of art … are not considered mainstream enough to be nominated for Emmys and Pulitzers, the facade presented in [HBO drama] Normal … profoundly shapes audience opinions about transsexual and intersex people". The problem, argued Serano, was that Normal appropriated gender-variant experiences without including transgender perspectives, replacing them with the director's unchallenged prejudices, which, intentionally or not, felt deeply transphobic.

From this position, it's easy to think cisgender (non-trans) actors taking trans roles entirely negative, but well written and researched, it can have benefits. Two British soap operas featured regular transsexual characters: Coronation Street's Hayley and Hollyoaks' Jason, played by Julie Hesmondhalgh and Victoria Atkin, both of whom worked with trans people to iron out cliches and earned praise for their sensitive performances, raised positive media discussions about transsexualism and became vocal trans rights advocates.

Obviously actors make their names by convincingly playing people of different backgrounds. The best depictions helped me as a closeted teen: none of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert's leads identified as transgender, but its smart, pithy avoidance of psychopaths or victim characters in favour of people intelligently handling trans-specific and other challenges gave hope that transsexual life was liveable – even if its cast offered no role models, which were also desperately needed, and which the film was better placed than most to provide.

Besides claiming that mainstream film/TV shows' duty is to entertain, you may ask: where are the professional trans actors? There is where cisgender actors playing trans people becomes more problematic: I cannot recall one out trans person playing a mainstream cisgender role, so their only entry may be in playing trans roles. America's Candis Cayne made a successful living like this, but there aren't enough trans parts for to sustain many professionals, and subtle barriers perpetuate the situation: audiences may tire of familiar faces, or feel they block younger talents, and actors may grow frustrated with being typecast.

The roles offered may further discourage trans actors. Calpernia Addams expressed her disdain at "out" trans people having to play "freaks": her short film Casting Pearls anticipated Sky Atlantic's inept advertisement for "a male-to-female pre-op transsexual" for Hit and Miss. This led trans bloggers to worry that the show may sensationalise its lead's genitalia (why else specify "pre-op"?) and that this indicated an exploitative approach. Unsurprisingly, given how this reduced an already small pool, they never found a transsexual person willing and able to take it on, despite holding auditions (they later cast Chloë Sevigny).

There may be "stealth" trans actors, if fear of being "exposed" does not daunt them (the speculation about Antonia San Juan after she played transsexual Agrado in Pedro Almodóvar's All about My Mother was feverish) but out actors have existed – there's a 50-year tradition of trans people representing themselves in queer underground film. Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures), Paul Morrissey (Women In Revolt) and German director Rosa von Praunheim (City of Lost Souls) cast transvestite or transsexual-identified people ("transgender" was not used widely before the 90s) as trans characters: they could fill gaps in semi-improvised scripts with lived experience, and draw on deep emotional memories for pre-written scenes. Paradoxically, these performances didn't strive for "realism": they had no need, as their personal histories provided authenticity and dodged the reduction of "a transsexual" (in Stephenson's words) to a set of practices and conventions.

It may be that nobody with a trans history is competent to play mainstream roles – it's hard to know, as few explanations for casting decisions have been forthcoming, and until a test case, little will change. If openly trans people were occasionally given cisgender roles, or if mainstream broadcasters or filmmakers finally try a trans actor, even a non-professional, in a leading trans role (as arthouse director Sébastien Lifshitz did recently in Wild Side), then we see the media landscape shift entirely, and provide a generation with opportunities and inspirations. That could be a brilliant story.